Re: Awful.

Screw it - you've given me a headache - you've still got your 50 mouths, but you've lost a pair of eyeballs - I used to click the ads.

I don't know why you had to dick around with the article layouts like this - I am not 12 - I come here to read some bile ringed tech news - not gawp at full screen images (ok they're not quite full screen, but on my laptop they are bloody close).

Re: A measureable improvement

But sweetie - this site is targeted at geeks and techies - it's great that you work in publishing - but this isn't a reflective bit of paper - it's a back-lit screen - so in this environment so much brilliant white with a narrow typeface is actually more effort to read and results in more eye train particularly when you look how closely spaced the characters are compared to the line and paragraph spacing.

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

1999 has called they want their fugly portal layout back - seriously WHAT were you thinking - it's an abomination - particularly against the bloody geckos you have plastered all over the background - I thought the Guardian was bad - but Jesus Christ - this layout is so noisy - have you never considered usability?

Marketing Dept is at the BBC

down with rates

What would be the consequences of scrapping the idea of a 'national' interest rate - wouldn't local rates encourage money to slosh around between the regions - or is that the idea - to stop speculation at the expense of regional economies?

not so clever now

""The bidding process, as reported by Reuters, was at times surreal, with Google making bids based upon such mathematical concepts as Brun's constant, the Meissel-Mertens constant, and even pi – one Google bid was, yes, $3.14159bn."

Missing the point about pricing

Most people don't have a problem with the current set-up:

Imagine two researchers at different points in their work; A is carrying out a literature review and only needs to skim through the paper, B is experiencing a problem that the methodology described in the paper could solve.

How much is the paper worth to A? - it's only one of many - so probably pennines. For B the paper is essential, so they'd probably pay through the nose for it.

A is an undergrad and they can access the material through their University library at minimal personal cost - the University pays a subscription to access the archive, not a per document fee. B works for a pharamaceutical business and his research budget will cover the cost.

A and B would both prefer not to have to pay to read the paper, but considering the cost/benefits they are probably happy enough with the prices they are presented with.

The price of an article from a journal doesn't reflect its value - you can't easily put a dollar amount on knowledge, when prices stop reflecting demand/value there's usually another reason for them.

With a lot of publications you can get unrestricted access to their archive when you take out a longer term subscription - Newspapers do this a lot.

Now consider C - he's interested in the paper for personal reasons - he's not a member of a University and doesn't have a multi-million pound budget. To him $15 to read a paper seems grossly unfair, especially when it would only cost $120 a year to subscribe to the Journal - getting access to everything they've already published for free.

The $15 re-print fee in this case acts as an anchor to make the annual subscription look more attractive.

Journals use re-prints as a marketing tool to sell subscriptions, not as a direct source of income.

Expertly curated collctions of data 1.0

"Off the top of my head, Properly organised and index the papers, with related papers grouped and linked together with summaries of how things have changed over the years. Access to experts to ask questions about the research would be highly also desirable."

- I don't know about you, but where I live we call those places libraries, they have professionals who can help you make sense of all of the information and in most cases they'll lend it to you for free.

Pr0n sites for Slabfondlers?

re: No! It Cannot be

@Phormic you say: "But...but...but...it's just a big iPod Touch! It's just a fad! My netbook can do so much more! It's just marketing, it just spin, I give it six months tops, it's, it's, IT'S...brain explodes..."

Do you not think that the figures back up the idea that "My netbook can do so much more!", it looks like *all* anybody uses them for is mobile gaming or web browsing - I run Visual studio on my Netbook - it runs like a dog, it's not going to get me laid, but it gets the job done.

http://blog.alpha.gov.uk/team

"What happens when you sit a small team of people in a room in South London for 14 weeks and ask them to create something? If it’s these people, it would be Alpha.gov.uk!" - what a pile of back slapping 2.0 gob shites.

It's all relative

Sorry to state the bleeding obvious - but you've identified a bunch of keys defined one table - wouldn't that suggest that the data might be linked to information held in other tables?

Perhaps phone keeps a unique record of the location of each hotspot/tower and also has a table (with one entry per second) referencing them - you know, some kind of a log - so when you use the two together you can generate a detailed mapping of the phones location over time.

@AC?

Hashed salty hash

We cache the hash of the hash of the encrypted salted input, unhashing the cached hash gives you a hash, unhashing that hash gives you an encypted string, decoding that gives you the salted input, but our salt is a method not a constant, so you need the secret recipe.